Change, how?

If you believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the track we are on, and to continue down the current path will ultimately to disaster, then the question you have to face is what needs to change?

So the first question is: are we basically on the right track, and just need to make some adjustments?

If your answer to this is yes, then playing the game of contemporary politics, with a few policy adjustments here and there, is something that you believe will change the course and the destination from disaster to solution. In this case there is no need for a new political party, and the best thing to do is to roll up your sleeves, get involved with the existing parties, and then make sure the appropriate adjustments get made.

Note: you may also arrive at this conclusion simply because you have not considered there are any practical alternatives to the current system. This is not the same as believing that we are basically on the right track, and if you are only engaged with the current system because you cannot see any alternatives, you should really re-evaluate your position.

If your answer to first question is no, then the second question is: is there a viable alternative to what we’re doing today?

There are two basic categories into which the answers to this question fall: either they harken back to solutions which have already been tried historically, or they look forward to new solutions which we have not yet attempted.

Solutions from the past include communism, full-throated individualistic capitalism, despotism, dictatorship, caliphates and other forms of religious government, fascism, expansionist imperialism, a return to agrarian subsistence, and, last but not least, various forms of leftist socialism typical of European nations since WWII. Inevitably you will believe that these did not fail in the past because of any inherent weaknesses, but simply because of failures in their implementation. In our opinion you are deluding yourself, and these have all failed in the past for perfectly good reasons.

New solutions? Although there has been a dearth of new thinking in politics, economics and the science of human organisation in the last fifty years, we believe there is a new solution. A solution that takes the best from what we have already learned and fashions a new formula based on the best of those ideas and a realistic assessment of both the human condition and the environment we live in. Our best version of what that new solution looks like is what we are proposing in LIFE.

On the surface the policies proposed by LIFE are simply adjustments to the social-democratic-capitalist system commonly practised in the industrial world today. But underneath, LIFE’s policies actually propose a wholesale rearrangement of the social contract, and the structure of the economy. The mutual contract for unconditional social support is new. The understanding that economic activity falls into two distinct realms, hygiene and wealth, is new. The adoption of modern sophisticated democratic structures, the embracing of technology, and the fundamental appreciation of the role of individual freedom as essential to group function, are all new. And the fact that all of these policies are based on inherently natural human characteristics, imbues them with an almost unintentional, automatic consequence of environmental sustainability.

So if you believe we are fundamentally on the wrong track today, and you are not a fan of old solutions that failed in the past, then it behooves you take a long good look at the proposals of LIFE as the only reasonable, practical and available new alternative on offer.